The clarion. [volume] (Jackson, Miss.) 1883-1888, 1887-06-22
A WONDERFUL DISCOVERY.
Edison's Latest Invention Puts All Pre-
vious Ones In the shade.

Edison's Latest Invention Puts An Pre-
vious Ones In the shade
A writer in the Washington Pos.
gives an account of recent interview
of a most remarkable character with
Edison. the inventor. In this interview
Edison is made to describe new ma
chine which he calls the nutricator.
This machine, the writer says. has ae-
complished the problem of combining
the natural elements so as to manu-
facture wholesome food Edison is
made TO say in this interview: In ten
years my machines will be used To pro-
vide the tables of the civilized world.
Meat will be no longer killed and vege-
tables no longer grown, except by
savages, for my methods will be much
cheaper" Mr.. Edison then exhibited
samples of food which he said he had
made from dirt in his cellar and from
water taken from the water-pipes in
the house. The writer says:
He led me down pair of stairs into
light basement room. where 3
swarthy-looking man was busy about
big machine, an iron vessel, holding
about barrel. attached to something
that looked like hydraulic ram. The
shelves We're lined with chemicals.
There was small battery in the corner
from which one wire went to the vat.
A kerosene lamp burned under a sort
of retort- That and four crooked
pipes with handles were all that was
visible.
''How is it now3' said Edison.
'About So" replied the man. That
was all. We returned to the room
above. Il shall simplify that machine
one-half," he remarked. yet with
that L can turn out at least five tons of
food of various kinds every day. /
have already made eighteen kinds OF
food. l will tell you something if YOU
will not say word till l say go
ahead All food comes, of course, pri-
marily, from the earth. The plants
and fruits we eat come from the moist
ground, and the animals we eat live on
the plants, or on other animals which
the plants have kept alive. So all
food comes from the elements stored i'm
earth, air, and water. You eat a grain
of wheat, for instance. The wheat is
mainly composed of few simple gases
and salts that last year were lying dor
mant in the earth, the air, and the
water.
at occurred 10 me that this process
might be FASTENED; that instead of wait.
ing year for nature to collect those
elements into an organic seed / could
collect them in an hour, or perhaps
few minutes, and arrive at the same
result by combining them organicallv.
This | have done. | first find out what
a particular kind of food is made of
There are sixty-five simple elements in
nature: that is, substances which we
call simple elements, because we have
not yet succeeded in proving them to
be compound. | am afraid your read.
ers will not generally understand what
l am going to say. If you use it be
careful to take it down verbatim.
There are sixty-five elements. Car
bon is the king of these. 1t is the
great organizer. 1t is never absent
from any plant or animal organism. II
is at the base of almost everything. 1t
is the key to my discovery, for il pos
sesses the peculiar capacity to form
molecules from its own atoms. The
diamond is pure carbon, so are graphite
and charcoal nearly pure carbon,
though they are so different Sugar
and starch belong to the hydrocarbons,
and | can not understand why their
manufacture out of earth and water
hasn't been hit on before. / form all
my meat compounds by exposing three
elements in "A red-hot state to nitrogen
gas, though | use different flavors
which | get from the earth. too. /
have had to bring from Westchester
county some argillaceous soil not found
here.
IL can make a wine, and have made
it, with New Jersey earth and water
that no man can tell from Chateau
Yquem. | find that those elements
that have the same atomicity-that is,
the same bonds by which they unite
with one another or with compound
molecules. This great invention has
not been hit on before because analy-
tic chemistry has received too much at
tention to the exclusion of synthetic
chemistry; men have been more de-
voted to learning than to doing. La
voisier was just on the edge of it and
missed. Sir Humphrey Davy, Liebig,
and Faraday were all in sight of it and
suddenly turned aside. They succeed
ed in making urea out of the elements
and several other inorganic substances.
but they stopped at that They over
looked the simplicity of this thing.
Il think that after two or three years
New Workers, for instance, will no longer
eat meat or vegetables. They will not
send to the tropics for fruits, or to
Europe for wines, because the head of
every family, by turning crank (or,
perhaps, without turning crank, if a
clock apparatus is attached), can pro
duce more delicious fruits and wines at
a tenth of the cost.
''Sir Isaac Newton said: The proper
ties of all food are in the dirt under
our feet and in the air over our heads
but they elude our grasp l was
led on by Dalton's great discovery of
the law of multiple proportions, that
the atomic weight of compounds is the
same as the atomic weight of their in
gradients. l was helped also by the
well-known law of ismorphism, that
certain groups of substances exist, any
member of which can be replaced by
any other member in equivalent pro-
portions without changing the crystal
line character of the matter.
The extraordinary analogy between
homologous groups of organic COM
pounds and certain small groups of
the elements, as chlorine, bromine, and
iodine, have been remarked by many
chemists. Not only isolated triads, but
all the elements may be brought into
such homologous series expressed by